Add support for ARM

[ethanfrey]

This is now supported in wasmer (as of 0.11) and has been requested by Zach. If we can update the build-scripts to support it, that would be a cool addition

https://medium.com/wasmer/running-webassembly-on-arm-7d365ed0e50c

[ethanfrey]

Update: I tried but there were still some issues with wasmer. Also, they are going through a re-write to 1.0, so not worth the time now.

I would ask for help on this for some Pi-lover once we have a solid wasmer release.

[faddat]

Well I am certainly pi lover, so let me know when you think we have a solid wasmer release 👍

[webmaster128]

Wasmer claims to have good support for the new ARM based MacBook now. So it should be possible to support both aarch64-apple-darwin and aarch64 Linux.

[Kwaskoff]

Well I am certainly pi lover, so let me know when you think we have a solid wasmer release +1

We got Wasmer release already!
https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/releases/tag/1.0.1

[webmaster128]

@Kwaskoff was there any relevant change in Wasmer between 1.0.0 (integrated here already) and 1.0.1?

This ticket is unblocked but the Confio team will probably not work on it until we have developers with ARM Macs as dev machines. If this is important to you, feel free to look into it. A good starting point is the compatibility table here: https://github.com/CosmWasm/wasmvm#overview

[faddat]

I... believe that this is solvable.

[faddat]

Graviton2, Ubuntu 20.10:

sudo apt install llvm-11-dev llvm-11
export IS_LINUX=1
export IS_AARCH64=1

What if it was not the singlepass compiler?

May I use cranelift and expect it to work?

[faddat]

#####
#
# The Matrix
#
#####

# The matrix is the product of the following columns:
#
# |------------|--------|----------|--------------|-------|
# | Compiler   ⨯ Engine ⨯ Platform ⨯ Architecture ⨯ libc  |
# |------------|--------|----------|--------------|-------|
# | Cranelift  | JIT    | Linux    | amd64        | glibc |
# | LLVM       | Native | Darwin   | aarch64      | musl  |
# | Singlepass |        | Windows  |              |       |
# |------------|--------|----------|--------------|-------|
#
# Here is what works and what doesn't:
#
# * Cranelift with the JIT engine works everywhere,
#
# * Cranelift with the Native engine works on Linux+Darwin/`amd64`,
#   but it doesn't work on */`aarch64` or Windows/*.
#
# * LLVM with the JIT engine works on Linux+Darwin/`amd64`,
#   but it doesn't work on */`aarch64` or Windows/*.
#
# * LLVM with the Native engine works on
#   Linux+Darwin/`amd64`+`aarch64`, but it doesn't work on Windows/*.
#
# * Singlepass with the JIT engine works on Linux+Darwin/`amd64`, but
#   it doesn't work on */`aarch64` or Windows/*.
#
# * Singlepass with the Native engine doesn't work because it doesn't
#   know how to output object files for the moment.
#
# * Windows isn't tested on `aarch64`, that's why we consider it's not
#   working, but it might possibly be.

[ethanfrey]

Cranelift compiles better. BUT it is not safe for a blockchain context.
It is an optimizing compiler and it is expected that giving it arbitrary malicious wasm to compile could open up attack vectors, minimally O(N^2) compile time (where N is the size of the wasm contract)

We need this to compile with singlepass to be useful for wasmd

[faddat]

"Cranelift with the JIT engine" is OK?

[ethanfrey]

If this is not supported by wasmer, feel free to jump on their github and raise an issue. (It will have more chance of getting addressed)